In case you missed it, the political world was thrown into a frenzy last weekend when the North Carolina Board of Elections abruptly refused to certify Mark Harris’ apparent narrow victory over Dan McCready in NC-09. This district and its various permutations have been in Republican hands without interruption since 1953. However, despite being drawn to ensure it stayed that way in a mid-decade redistricting, Harris only defeated McCready by 905 votes—the closest that the Democrats came to flipping a seat in North Carolina.
It has since become apparent that there was a rank odor surrounding this race. Specifically, in absentee ballots on the far eastern end of the district, which was reconfigured to stretch from south Charlotte all the way to Fayetteville. There have been claims of out-and-out criminal conduct—like ballots being collected before being completed, and in some cases filled in with votes for Harris when the rest of the ballot pattern indicated they would have voted for McCready. Additionally, a number of analysts have found suspicious anomalies in absentee ballots from the two most rural counties in the district, Bladen and Robeson. Not only were there a large number of unreturned ballots, but Harris reportedly won almost two-thirds of absentee ballots in Bladen County—a pattern not repeated elsewhere in the district.
Well, if there was any doubt that there was something fishy in this election, it was erased today. There are multiple reports that some of the same people witnessed multiple signings of absentee ballots.
Judd Legum, founder of ThinkProgress, first detonated this bombshell in a series of tweets for his startup newsletter, Popular Information.
While North Carolina law allows people to witness multiple absentee ballots, just eight people witnessing 132 ballots is curious at best. Even more curious, many of the same people witnessed ballots together.
What bumps this beyond “curious” is that some of the witnesses appear to be relatives of Leslie McCrae Dowless, the “independent contractor” for Harris’ top campaign consultant. Dowless is suspected of masterminding the effort to illegally collect absentee ballots. According to Gerry Cohen, a former general counsel for the state legislature, many of these ballots arrived in Raleigh in clumps. Combined with the multiple claims that ballots were collected before they were sealed, Cohen believes that there was definitely fraud here.
WSOC-TV in Charlotte largely corroborated Legum’s reporting. It did its own analysis and found that many of the same people in Legum’s analysis witnessed 159 ballots.
WSOC-TV political reporter Joe Bruno collared one of the witnesses, Ginger Eason, who admitted on-camera that she was helping Dowless collect ballots for anywhere from $75 to $100 a week—not knowing that she was breaking the law. She never mailed them, but instead gave them to Dowless; she didn't know whether Dowless ever sent them to Raleigh.
Dowless has been under fire for this before. In 2016, he was busted for illegally collecting ballots and filling them out for someone else. And yet, he still managed to get a gig with the Harris campaign—apparently because Harris knew him. He briefly worked with Bill Givens, a parishoner at Harris’ former church on an unsuccessful bid for the Charlotte city council.
Givens told The Charlotte Observer that there is no evidence that Dowless did anything shady on his campaign. But the fact that he admitted to illegally collecting ballots, combined with a 1992 conviction for perjury, suggests that he shouldn’t have been anywhere near Harris’ radar in the first place. And now it looks like Dowless and Harris crossed paths again—and this time, Dowless may have gone way over the line.
This isn’t just a red flag, folks. This is a flashing red light. There is no longer any doubt—this race is irrevocably tainted with fraud. While a formal hearing isn’t scheduled until December 21, we know enough now to know that the only remedy is a new election. We also know that a lot of people need to go to jail.